"Life is Beautiful" ("La vita è bella") can be
divided into two very different parts. The first, classic Italian comedy,
full of funny barbs against fascism and racism, happens mostly in the Tuscan
town of Arezzo, in 1939. Roberto Benigno, who wrote and directed the film,
also played the main role, Guido: this Guido of Arezzo is Jewish;
he works as a waiter; he courts Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigno's wife
in real life,) and ends up marrying her and having a child, Giosué
(Giorgio Cantarini.) About the excellence of the acting and the funniness
of the action in this first part there seems to be consensus, but opinions
are bitterly divided when it comes to the second part. We are now in 1944;
Guido, Giosué and the old uncle (Giustino Durano) are deported to
Germany; Dora, who is not Jewish, insists in sharing their destiny. The
rest takes place in a concentration camp. It looks like Auschwitz, but
can't be since in the end it's liberated by the Americans. Anyway, the
intention here is not realistic; this "Auschwitz" is merely a backdrop
for the continuation of the comedy: the Uncle is gassed, the place is hellish,
but Guido manages to maintain his four-year old son under the illusion
that it's all a game, that in the end, if he wins, he'll get a war tank
as a prize. And in the end, indeed, he does: a real American tank whose
driver takes Giosué up into the turret and puts a cask on his head.
The last shot (soon after Guido has been shot by the Nazis) is of Giosué
held by his mother, little arms raised, shouting, "Abbiamo vinto!" ("We
won!").

"Triumph of the spirit," "bittersweet," "human resilience
in the face of..." -- let us set those and similar clichés aside
and ask the important questions: Is comedy a proper way to represent the
sacred? Or are such representations sacrilegious? Is the sacred denied
by laughter and dissolved or trivialized by smiles? Since this movie has
won three Academy awards and a Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, plus favorable
reviews in the NewYork Times and other newspapers, clearly
there are many who would answer those questions respectively Yes, No, No.
Yet many other reviewers loathed the movie. Either they took it for granted,
without any serious attempt at justification, that comedy and the Holocaust
cannot be mixed, or they accused Benigni of softening the horror, as if
it went without saying that art must stay within the strict limits of historical
truth. The New Yorker film critic David Denby, one of the loathers,
argued only that:

"Benigni's ironic counter-reality
undermines this movie, not the Nazis, who were beyond ridicule for the
same reason that they were beyond rationality. Totalitarianism makes the
fantastic literal -- that is its demonic appeal."

Denby's argument is silly. How can "the same reason"
(whatever it may be) cause something to lie beyond rationality and
beyond ridicule? It would seem that the contrary is true: if something
appears to us as being beyond rationality, it should be rather easy to
make fun of it -- unless that something happens to be sacred to us. It
is of course not the Nazis but the Holocaust that's sacred to us. As for
the Nazis, Chaplin ridiculed them quite effectively in "The Great Dictator,"
and Benigni, here, cruelly ridicules all Germans, particularly in
what they used to hold most dear: their poets and thinkers, their Kultur,
their Bildung. In the first part of the movie there is a Doctor
Lessing (Horst Buchholz) who loves riddles (like the one from the Sphinx,
whose answer is, Man); Guido helps him solve them, they grow fond of each
other; as they part, Lessing praises Guido as a genius, and Guido praises
the German as a most learned man. In the second part, Lessing is the SS
doctor at the camp; when he and Guido recognize each other during a "medical"
round, the doctor expresses an urgent wish for private communication. We
expect that Lessing will help Guido somehow, but when, in a magnificently
played scene, they finally have a chance to talk and Guido, choking with
hope, tells that Dora, his wife, is also at the camp, the doctor doesn't
even register; all he wants, all he begs from the astonished prisoner is
help to solve one more riddle having to do with ducks that go, "Quack,
quack, quack," which obsesses him and robs him of his sleep. Since the
illustrious Gotthold E. Lessing, Enlightment playwright and critic, admirer
of Spinoza and friend of Moses Mendelssohn, is known as one of Germany's
most liberal and tolerant thinkers, Benigni's sting carries an extra dose
of poison. Stronger, I'd say, than Spielberg's and his picture-perfect
villains.

No, the Nazis are not beyond ridicule, and as for Denby's
other contention, that the "demonic appeal" of totalitarianism resides
in that it "makes the fantastic literal," I wonder if he would apply the
word "demonic" to technology, by far the most important agency transforming
fantastic into literal before our nose. The question, again, is whether
comedy is a legitimate approach to the sacred -- in the present case, the
Holocaust. Old question, no doubt, and the answer may be culture bound.
But I should clarify: in saying "sacred" I don't imply any moral valuation,
either good or evil; I mean, roughly, what the German scholar Rudolf Otto
meant in his 1917 book, Das Heilige: a presence that's tremendous
and overpowering, awful yet fascinating, weird in the undebased sense of
that word, and not graspable by concepts, so beyond reason. The sacred
is dangerous and compels reverence. Today, our Judeo-Christian collective
memory of the Holocaust carries a stronger sacral charge than the Binding
of Isaac or the Passion of Christ, whence the impassioned disagreements
as to which genres (if any) may legitimately represent it. Spielberg's
melodrama and Wertmuller's film noir are not without their loathers; the
least objectionable is the clinically documentary, seemingly fable-free
treatment by Lanzmann. Apparently it is the fable, the mythos, that's felt
by some to be blasphemous or indelicate: they'd prefer to keep the sacred
demythified and scientific.

Well then, what about "Life is Beautiful": does it work?
Much as I enjoyed the first part of the movie, I was often uncomfortable
during the second half, especially at the beginning: as Guido, Giosué
and the old Uncle were carted north, I kept fidgeting in my seat, closing
my eyes and muttering, "No more; it ought to end right now." My discomfort
before the novel might have been natural; in any case, after scenes like
the one with Lessing and his quacks were added to my repertoire of indelible
memories, I must say that, somehow or other, the film works.

* * *

Many events leave sacred scars among the nations, but
the most sacred are those revealing what men can inflict on men. And never
more profound than when the victims are not brought from afar, but are
familiar to the sacrificers, having lived in their midst. It's remarkable
that we can remember no historical time as fertile in sacred horrors as
our own; even though the European Holocaust is unarguably pre-eminent,
Latin America has had its fill, and Argentina, in particular, went through
her most terrible years between 1975 and 1982. The film "Tango," a joint
Argentine-Spanish production directed by Carlos Saura, deals, if only episodically
and spasmodically, with those events.

"Tango" has another feature in common with "Life is Beautiful":
it consists of two easily differentiable aspects. The eponymous music and
dance, taking up roughly half the time, is for export: few Argentines will
pay to see or hear what they can get, in more vivid detail, at the better
tango spots in Buenos Aires. For internal consumption there's a plot, minimal
and trite, but cannily devised so as to appeal to the snobbism of the local
public. The central character is a movie director, Mario (Miguel Angel
Solá), who is making a movie; meanwhile he has a love life: one
lover (Mia Maestro) leaves him and refuses to come back; then he takes
up with a young and beautiful girl, Elena (Cecilia Narova;) until then
she was going out with the mafioso (Juan Carlos Copes) who's financing
Mario's movie. Those in the public who catch the similarities with Fellini's
"8 1/2" are supposed to feel a little smart-alecky frisson of self-congratulation.

All of this would have no interest for this reviewer,
except for the references to the years of torture and repression. An episode
of Mario's movie is a dance representing soldiers rounding up prisoners
and the torture of a woman; after a viewing of it, the mafioso and the
other producers object that the public doesn't want to see depressing stuff,
Argentines would rather forget. Mario is bravely adamant: he replies by
quoting Borges. At one point he shows some of Goya's dark images. At another,
he's lying in bed, having a post-coital talk with Elena, both worried about
what the violent mafioso might inflict on them; Mario says that, having
spent the worst years in Europe, he returned to find that all his friends
had been murdered. Elena replies that they should forget the horror and
concentrate on their love; Mario, however, insists that they should remember,
for the sake of their identity. The torture dance, to tango music of course,
is not moving; Mario never sounds authentic and never mouths anything but
commonplaces; I didn't feel, however, that there was anything terribly
wrong up to that point. Inept maybe, but not demeaning.

The turn comes when the mafioso finds out that Elena has
left him; he entreats, he begs, then he threatens. When Elena refuses him
with the same words Mario's first lover used at the beginning of the movie,
we know something is wrong. Both women are actresses in Mario's
movie; in the end, the violent mafioso declares that he's neither violent
nor mafioso: he, too, has been playing a role. Ah, now smart Aleck understands
the meaning of those mirrors all over the set: everything is a play of
reflections, everything's a mirage. Or, as Mario himself says, "Siempre
las mismas pavadas" (the same nonsense, over and over again.) All along,
the makers of this movie knew that the plot was ridiculously trite, merely
a flimsy excuse for a tango dance spectacle for export; now we see they
were being self-reflectively ironic. As smart Aleck will put it: "This
film is post-modern, didn't you realize?"

The Argentine intelligentsia seems to go in a big way
for this kind of thing, where signs are only meant as comments upon signs,
their referents always postponed, the presence of those referents consistently
denied, and truth ever pushed away from poor Tantalus. I guess this "post-modernism"
tickles or flatters their intelligence, convinced of its own sharpness
but unused or unable to bite on anything substantial. I wonder if Argentines
realize what this film does to the memory of their horror, which cannot
avoid being undercut, ironized, evaporated into a mirage along with all
the rest.

This brings me to the moral of this fable, which
is that, each in its own way, all arts and all genres can -- conceivably
-- represent the sacred, present it to our reverence. Comedy, farce, dance,
te-deum or tango, even idyll and pastoral -- all of them, except for the
"post-modern" exercise. This is not because "Tango" is a failure; the reason
is essential. The essence of "post-modernism" is to deny the possibility
of presence; the essence of the experience of the sacred is to impress,
to force upon us the reality of presence. There are those who maintain
we would be better off without it, but that's another story.